You're never too old to rock 'n' roll the opera...Muirsical Conversation with Ian Anderson, MBE

Mention the name Jethro Tull to anyone and it’s almost a certainty that, whether a bona fide rock fan or someone just vaguely familiar with the name, they will cite either the rock band or Ian Anderson, the singer, songwriter, flautist and multi-instrumentalist who has fronted Jethro Tull since their 1968 beginnings.

By the same token very few, if any, will answer with the 18th century agricultural innovator and inventor from whom the band took their name. Ian Anderson, one of the great storytelling lyricists, is putting that historical oversight to rights by honouring the man who gave the band their name via Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera.Anderson’s latest project puts both the music of Jethro Tull and the man called Jethro Tull centre stage; the results are an interesting and imaginative way to place the 18th century agricultural pioneer in the 21st century whilst also bringing a fresh storytelling perspective to some of the classic Jethro Tull back catalogue.

Ian Anderson spoke to FabricationsHQ to talk about the show (including the factual and near-future fictional aspects of the story) as well as provide a little reflective insight in to the band's past and non-retirement thoughts on his musical present and immediate future...

Ross Muir: On your last couple of solo albums, Thick as a Brick 2 and Homo Erraticus, you presented not just some of your best-ever material but some of your strongest story-telling within creative, conceptual and progressive musical frameworks.Gerald Bostock, the central character of Thick as a Brick, was a themed feature of both albums and you are reimagining the life of 18th century agriculturist Jethro Tull for the 21st century in your Rock Opera show. Is the revisiting of older Tull themes and reappraising classic material in such fashion something that keeps it fresh for a creative artist such as yourself?

Ian Anderson: Well the Jethro Tull repertoire is very extensive and goes back some forty-seven years now. That being the case when it comes to choosing material for a concert, and while there are lots of alternatives, clearly most people – consisting of long standing fans and newer, younger fans who are catching up on what it was their parents used to listen to – they want to be able to hear the heavy hitters.They want to hear the main, classic elements of that repertoire if not solely – in the context of a set-list for a concert – then at least as a fair amount of that set-list. So with that in mind, rather than just playing these songs in isolation – separated as they are by the many years, the many albums and the twenty-six different musicians in addition to me who have been part of the Jethro Tull line-up over those years – it seemed like a good idea to give that all some kind of a context to play the Jethro Tull repertoire in, along with a narrative that would link all these songs together and give them a reason to be there in the same concert. And when I thought about the idea last year of examining the life story of the original 18th century agriculturist Jethro Tull I was surprised, interested and captivated by the discovery that many of the songs I’d written over the years seemed to be if not a perfect fit – although sometimes they were – usually quite a good fit for elements of his life story. Or at least as we know about them from historical accounts. There’s not actually a busting amount of information available on his life story, not a huge amount of detail, but there are a few accounts.I’ve distilled from those and tried to draw the common elements in to a single storyline.

RM: And it’s a storyline with a near future setting…

IA: Well, rather than turn out something that would be a bit like Downton Abbey with a flute [laughter] I thought I would set this in the present day or even a near future and have my Jethro Tull be a bio-chemist working on genetically modified crops and new technological ways of increasing food production in the face of our dwindling resources and an ever-growing population. I think that’s a very apt story for today and I hope the ghost of Jethro Tull will forgive me – yet again – for my intrepid use of his name and using my imagination to create a storyline which I hope is paying homage to the original Jethro Tull, his inventiveness and his place in history.

RM: That’s interesting about your discovery of some of the songs being a good fit for elements of Jethro Tull’s life story – yet when you were writing them I presume there was never any conscious effort on your part to relate those songs to Jethro Tull?

IA: No, and I would never have given it any thought until I started to examine the life story of Jethro Tull, which was actually last year when I had an internet connection while sitting in a car on tour in Europe.It amused me to think "well, I’ll just read up about the original Jethro Tull and find out, in a bit more detail, what he was about" because there had been the embarrassment of finding out just two weeks after Jethro Tull began back in February of 1968 that our agent had given us the name of a dead guy who invented the seed drill as opposed to having just invented a name – which is what I assumed he had done when he said "how about the name Jethro Tull?" So I was not inclined, over the following years, to go in to the detail of the historical character Jethro Tull;I felt a little bit embarrassed and a little bit strange about going in to the detail about something that, to me, was a slightly awkward reality having purloined the name of a person I should have known about if I had studied that period of history at school. Which unfortunately I didn’t!

RM: But then to be fair not many of us did; I’m one of the many fans who only knew well after the event that the name related to a noted, historical figure. But you’re certainly giving him his place now and making people aware of who Jethro Tull was through the Rock Opera. What inspired the operatic approach?

IA: When you put a story like this together it really is like an opera, or at least my experience of opera.I’ve been to a few, listened to a few and seen a few on television – and I find them to be, without exception, unbelievably confusing.I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, whether it’s sung in Italian, or German or even when I’ve been to an opera sung in English – I still can’t hear all the words and I still can’t make sense of the storyline without reading the programme notes!And even then there’s still a kind of disconnect between trying to figure out what’s actually happening on stage and what the storyline is, which you’ve read in synopsis on a theatre programme.

So I’m well aware that it’s potentially a very confusing area in which to work, but by the use of the operatic device the recitative I connect my songs together with very short sections of spoken word or song that take us from one piece of music and leads us into the next by way of explanation.And that’s why I call it a Rock Opera – it’s got a timeline, it’s got a narrative and it has an operatic device at the heart of it, which connects the material together.

But I still think, in order to explain all that, I will have to use every means possible including social media, our website, printed notes in the tour programme and the elements that will be on the video screen to explain the storyline; otherwise it will be confusing and I want to make it relatively simple and understandable.

People don’t go to a rock concert to be lectured or educated in the elements of history – even if reimagined in the present day – so you’ve got to make it upbeat and entertaining in a cheerful way for people who perhaps aren’t really concerned about the storyline and just want to hear their favourite songs.So my job is to try and reach out to people on different levels and not make it all too clever or too difficult for them – as was made for me when I went to see real operas! [laughs]

RM: I love the passion of a strong operatic voice, particularly male tenors, and the sound of opera chorus voices; but as regards opera itself it’s a form of musical theatre I struggle desperately to appreciate, primarily for the what-the-hell-is-going-on reasons you just described.You mentioned a video screen as being part of the on-stage narrative or recitative…

IA: I’m working with a number of people – most of whom I’ve worked with before – and their contributions will vary on screen from tiny little instrumental offerings of a few seconds to people making appearances who are singing a few lines as one of the main characters in the show.We have Jethro Tull Snr, the father of Jethro Tull as we know him; we have the young Jethro Tull being packed off to school to study Law in Oxford whilst he really wants to be either a musician or a farmer – I’m talking now about the true historical reality – and marrying his childhood sweetheart Susanna.Then we have the older, middle-aged Jethro Tull and the older Susanna from our own, present-day story of the characters.He is now a scientist working on patented crop technologies and making tons of money through his international Agrochemical business while she is now a pragmatic executive of the company.Susanna is helping her husband steer the company to greater fortunes and creating the dilemma of what is appropriate, ethical and morally acceptable in terms of making money out of feeding people who may well be on the verge of starvation.

RM: So not just a Rock Opera but a show with topical, thought provoking questions.

IA: And these are questions that I think are really issues for today and for the future; we’re all too ready to jump down the throats of the big agribusiness and pharmaceutical industries for making tons of money out of selling their very expensive drugs; on the other hand we can’t forget that they have invested millions – or even billions – in the science, the technology and the research of bringing a certain product to the market place.So there has to be a thin dividing line between what is morally and ethically acceptable when you’re looking at your own personal morality as well as the ethics of the business you are in – what is acceptable in terms of capitalistic endeavour when it comes to feeding humanity?These are issues for today and issues that we are all concerned about – or ought to be – and that’s the subject material that lies behind songs that I’ve written and put together in this way.And I’m not really changing very much of what I’ve written in the past – Locomotive Breath for example was written about the unstoppable locomotive of, essentially, population growth; I wrote that in 1971!My first climate change song, as such, was called Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day…

IA: Skating Away was written in 1973, when scientists believed that Global Cooling was the most likely future scenario rather than Global Warming! But the point is I’ve been doing this all my life; I’ve written songs about religion, about morality, about paedophilia, about [gasps in fake horror] sex for sale! [laughter]

RM: No, it hasn’t exactly been album after album of I Love You Baby songs, has it?

IA: No and it’s not as if we’re having a mid-life crisis – or a late life crisis in my case [laughs] – where I’m suddenly pouring out all this troubled stuff; it’s what I’ve been doing for more than forty years and you’ve been listening to for all this time [laughs]. I’m just explaining it a little better and putting it in context.

RM: Indeed; there has been social relevance and storytelling in Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson material through the decades and that clearly continues with the Rock Opera.On that very subject of time – does it seem like forty-seven years of Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson?

IA: Well it depends on the point from which you look at it. When you walk on stage every night to perform songs it doesn’t seem like forty-seven years; it’s more than one or two [laughs], but it’s hard to think of it as forty-seven years of standing in the wings waiting to step out on to the stage of Bristol Colston Hall or the Royal Albert Hall or Newcastle City Hall or any of the places I’ve played over the years. I don’t feel the forty-seven year burden there but I think, when I do feel it, it seems to be more to do with people and relationships with former band members, specific times and places – remembering things like Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepping down on to the surface of the moon for example. That was at a time when I was in America on our first year of touring the USA and I was moved to write a song called For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me.Michael Collins was the third astronaut who was confined to the Command Module so was not able to get the glory of being one of the first men to step on the moon.He didn’t get to land but he did have his not well publicised orders that if anything went wrong down there he had to high-tail it out of there and try to get home, leaving his two buddies to their certain death.So that was a touching subject that reminds me of that place in history and sometimes I am reminded of time by the nature of the songs, the people I’m singing about or the people I’ve known or worked with.That’s when I am very crucially aware of the forty-six, forty-seven years.

RM: And it’s a forty-seven year musical journey that shows no sign of stopping any time soon…

IA: Luckily, I’m one of those guys who doing what I do for a living – in the creative arts and as a performer –we don’t have to retire at sixty-five.And, if we’re careful, we don’t have to go early like the tragic, early demises of so many people in the music business have taught us over the years. So if you’re reasonably careful and reasonably lucky with your life, your health and your relationships you don’t have to retire at sixty-five like a British Airways 747 Captain would. That must be a hell of a wrench, when you have to hand over your hat and your four gold stripes uniform and walk away, never to do it again. It’s the same for astronauts; I know some astronauts and they can’t get it out their heads that it’s over – that they are never going to fly to space again. They nurse this awful, frightening belief that one day the phone is going to ring and someone at the end of the phone is going to say "hey, get down to Kennedy, we need you here; you’re flying next week!" They all live this dream that it’s not over yet; it’s very hard to walk away from these things and that’s the same if you are a racing driver or a tennis star.But there’s an end in sight, which is probably your thirties if you are a racing driver or tennis player and your sixties if you are an airline pilot – we can maybe push it to your early fifties if you are an astronaut. But if you do what I do – or what James Galway the famous classical flautist does – and you’re seventy, eighty… what’s the problem? If your fingers still work, your brain is still active and you are in good health then age is not really an issue. I’m really fortunate to be in that situation and happily carrying on, at least for a little while to come!

Ian Anderson's musical creativity and storytelling are to the fore on the solo albums Thick as a Brick 2 (2012) and Homo Erraticus (2014); perfect new material counter-balances to classic material performances on Jethro Tull 'Best Of ' shows and their new setting in Jethro Tull - The Rock Opera.RM: That beyond sixty-five marker, in music terms, has never been more in evidence as artists "of an age" continue to perform at a high and successful level. There’s the fifty-plus years and counting longevity of the Rolling Stones; septuagenarians such as Paul McCartney, Paul Simon and Ian Hunter; octogenarians still recording and performing include John Mayall and Tony Bennett.There’s life in the old pop, rock, blues and crooner dogs yet.

IA: And that’s what most of us set out to prove; many of my contemporaries are still out there doing what they like to do and some of them would like to do it but can’t, for whatever reason.And not through any ill-health; I’m thinking of Jimmy Page who would love to be out there doing the Zeppelin thing again but, unfortunately, and as he said to me "someone’s going to have to have a word with the singer..." [laughter]

IA: I always feel a bit sad for Jimmy Page. The last time I met him was a few months ago in an airport – he was going off on a week’s holiday having finished remixing and mastering a Led Zeppelin album while I was heading off on a tour with my band and crew.But I could see the thinly disguised sense of envy that I was going off to do what he would love to be doing, to carry on flying that proud flag of what they had done over the years.In fact I thought for a minute that he was going to say "hang on, what flight are you on? I’ll come with you!"

RM: Jimmy’s unrealised dream is your musical reality however; the enjoyment of performing a selection of your classic, famous and revered catalogue to appreciative audiences around the world.And as regards taking the Rock Opera show out on the road it kicks off in September with a run of UK dates, but only six in all. More to follow, hopefully?

IA: As regards the UK it’s a relatively short stint, yes, but after the UK dates we go to Russia then Latin America and the USA before heading back to Europe for a few dates in Spain and other parts of Europe. That’s all through September until the end of the year but in 2016 we will be scheduling more dates so it’s possible we’ll do another swing through the UK and at least one more, if not two more, short American tours and a few European dates, intermingled in the summer with Best Of, non-production shows.I don’t like to call them festivals because what I prefer doing is summer shows – usually outdoors – that may be part of a festival series but are not multi-act festival days, where it’s you and ten other bands. That’s not my cup of tea; I don’t enjoy the extra stress and lack of sound checks at those sorts of operations. I’m not really a festival performer – at least not a happy one – but I do enjoy doing the shows when it’s more like an outdoor concert and you are the only people there… well, apart from a few members of an audience, hopefully! [laughs]

RM: Oh I’m sure they will be turning up for as long as you decide to perform, Ian, because as a wise man, musician and songwriter once sang in one of his songs – and has since unequivocally proven – you're never too old to rock 'n' roll…